Dear So and So: a gray lick of water pounds your bare feet. The ocean's heart opens in front of you, a failed embrace. Cold salt and hard driftwood slam in the eddy between two immense boulders and a dinghy shudders in its shallow mooring. The crack of rock on rock fills the air.

You can't write a fair poem about the ocean without the death of something. Oceans hear you but take revenge in their own slow time. You shouldn't be out in this rain and wind but yeah: there it is. I snapped the picture. The very last one.

Walk into a redneck bar in mid-coast Maine in 2022. In flip-flops and tight jeans, she'll be numbing her ganglia with gin or by the memory of you putting up sable curtains on rods at the apartment with the lobster traps outside;

the way you fucked her raw on the tar roof with no blanket; she picked gravel from your knee abrasions with a whiskey- soaked washcloth and your Buck knife's dulled blade; it'd been years since that knife had been near a stone but she sat nude

at your feet. You felt the tips of her breasts glow. Strewn-haired and damp with sex, she'll turn to you now, glass-tipped, fornicatory in her slippery movements and she'll nod in disbelief. It's 2022. 20 years of salt water spitting right in your damned eye.